


hello goodbye

by peacefrog



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Alternate Ending, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, Lovesick Will Graham, M/M, Post-Episode: s03e13 The Wrath of the Lamb, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-05
Updated: 2017-03-05
Packaged: 2018-09-28 13:25:02
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,233
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10103768
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/peacefrog/pseuds/peacefrog
Summary: Ding dong, the Dragon’s dead. Well and truly gone.





	1. Chapter 1

Ding dong, the Dragon’s dead. Well and truly gone. Will sits in his car outside BSHCI long enough to draw concern from within. Alana taps on his window.

“Everything okay?”

Will sighs and flips off the radio. “Just thinking. I’ll be in soon.”

Alana frowns, sadness in her eyes. “Go home, Will. He doesn’t deserve your goodbyes.”

Maybe he doesn’t, Will knows. But maybe this isn’t about what he deserves at all.

Will propels his body into movement. Out of the car and into the building, buzzing through one door to the next. The final set of doors dissolve before his eyes, the foyer of their shared memory taking form.

Hannibal Lecter is a monster, but Will now only sees the man. Antlers do not spring forth from his crown. His hands not talons but pale flesh too long hidden from the sun, cut through with veins pumping hot, red, human blood. His words are quiet, edging on desperate.

“You can go home again. If there’s any point. Is there any point?”

“I like my life there.”

“It won’t be the same. You’ll see it’s not the same.”

The words cut deep, an ache for which there is no balm. A hand to the glass between them. A goodbye. One final, quiet rejection.

Will manages to turn and walk from the room, but once the doors have shut behind him he all but runs to his car. In the bar a short distance from his motel Will blinds himself, drink after drink. Beer, whisky, whatever the hell the guy winking at him from across the bar just sent over. He loses the contents of his stomach all over his shoes halfway back to his room.

The world goes black around him. He wakes the next morning miraculously in his bed, nightmare sweat drying on his brow. He cleans himself up and goes home.

—

Molly’s released from the hospital. They return to their quiet life in Maine, but they’re not alone. Will carries the ghost of love like a waking nightmare on his shoulders. He stays up late drinking after Molly’s gone to bed. Walter doesn’t talk to him.

Spring roars in, unseasonably warm. Will fishes all day and drinks his nights away. He sleeps on the couch more often than not, remnants of a bottle close by. Winston watches him sadly from across the room.

“Whatever this is, you need to cut it out,” Molly says. “I can’t live like this anymore.”

In early June, three months after their last goodbye, Will drives eleven hours straight through from Moosehead Lake to Baltimore. He spends the better part of an hour trying to convince Alana to let him in.

“This isn’t what you think it is,” he says.

“This is exactly what I think it is.”

He pulls up a chair on his side of the glass in silence. Hannibal glides about within, a bird all too comfortable with his cage.

“I’d like to resume my therapy,” Will says.

“Certainly there are plenty of licensed therapists near your home.”

Will wavers between sadness and anger and shame. “They wouldn’t understand.”

Hannibal seats himself at his work table, folds his hands. The room around them twists and bends until they are back in his office in Baltimore, long windows stretching out beside them like eyes red with sunset.

“I’d be happy to recommend a marriage counselor. Trouble in the bedroom?”

“Stop it.” Will’s voice comes out broken. “Just stop.”

“Then tell me what’s troubling you. Why you drove half a day just to sit across from me.”

“I need you to teach me how to stop loving someone. There has to be some sort of cognitive therapy. You’ve rattled around him my head long enough to know how it works.”

“You wish to leave your wife?”

Will’s face twists in disgust. “No,” he says. “You. I need to get you out of my head. For good this time.”

Hannibal considers Will’s words. He turns his gaze toward the windows. The light breaks through in fractals and fragments. “Are you in love with me, Will?”

“Yes.”

“Is your wife aware?”

“I don’t talk to my wife about you.”

“Love confounds the greatest among us. It’s not a psychological disorder and there is no cure.”

“Then do something to make me hate you. Say something. Anything.”

Hannibal’s eyes lock with Will’s, a flame drawing him forth to burn. “I’ve betrayed the truth of our friendship, drugged you, framed you, drove you half out of your mind. I fed you the flesh of my victims against your will. I killed our surrogate daughter before your eyes. Left you for dead. I would have sawed open your skull and devoured your brain, and the rest of you, had la polizia not interrupted. I tried to have your family killed. I would have rejoiced in their deaths. What else is there left to do?”

Tears spring hot and fat from Will’s eyes. “Say that you don’t love me. That you’re incapable of it. Tell me you never want to see me again.”

“I love you, Will.” Hannibal’s voice flows like water from his lips to Will’s ears. “As I have never loved another. Every day without you is a living, waking torture. Your memory could never suffice.”

Will stands and kicks his chair away. The office melts away, glass once more separating them. Will steps toward the barrier and presses his trembling fingers through one of the openings. “Let me touch you.”

Hannibal rounds the table and approaches the glass. He kneels before Will, presses his face into the palm of his waiting hand. The curve of his cheek is warm with blush. He turns his face to press a kiss to the inside of Will’s wrist.

Will pulls away as if burned. “My wife’s going to leave me.”

Hannibal rises to his feet. “That seems to be the least of your concerns. Give me your hand. Please.”

Will obeys and Hannibal grips his wrist, bringing it to his lips, pressing another kiss to the center of his palm. Will allows himself the pleasure of the heat and doesn’t pull away.

“I love you, Will,” Hannibal echoes. Another kiss.

“Tell me what to do,” Will whispers.

Hannibal smiles. “Soon.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Inspired by an [ask on tumblr](http://crossroadscastiel.tumblr.com/post/158037997202/hugh-said-will-realized-he-was-in-love-with). A few hundred words that got way out of hand. Chapter 2 will be up shortly to earn this fic its rating.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Will,” Alana’s voice comes through frantic on the other end, “he’s gone. Hannibal’s gone.”

“Should I prepare to see you back here again tomorrow?” Alana asks, though it’s less of a question and more of a lament. “There are camera’s on him 24/7, you know.”

Will turns away. “I know.”

“Go back to your family, Will.”

Will leaves in a daze, all the spaces where Hannibal kissed him burning, palm and wrist licked with flame. He gets a room at the same motel he stayed in months previous. Sleep comes in fits and waves.

In the middle of the endless night, Will’s phone startles him awake.

“Will,” Alana’s voice comes through frantic on the other end, “he’s gone. Hannibal’s gone.”

The fog clears from Will’s mind at once. He bolts upright in bed. “What do you mean?”

“He went down in his cell an hour after you left. He had no pulse. We had no choice but to move him. We thought he was…”

“You think he’s here with me.”

“Where else would he go?” A dance of static in Will’s ears, then, “What did he say to you about this?”

“You heard every word, Alana. Don’t pretend otherwise.”

“Maybe you two have evolved language beyond words.”

Will clicks on the bedside lamp and rubs his eyes. “He’s not here. I don’t know where he’s going.”

“If he’s not with you he will be,” she says. “And I—”

Will hangs up at once and races for the door, leaving his phone on the nightstand. Keys in the ignition. Wheels burning rubber in the dark. Hannibal is watching, he knows. If he doesn’t move fast, others will be on him as well. 

He drives with no direction, without thought. Hours on back roads, stopping once to steal new plates, again to refuel, and finally to sleep at the edge of a barren country road. He wakes to dawn and Hannibal dozing in the passenger seat, clad in a sweater one size too small.

“You knew that I would find you,” Hannibal mumbles, cracking open his eyes.

“Was hoping it would be you before them.”

“Are you certain you weren’t being followed?”

“Only by you. I don’t know how I knew. Something in your eyes before I left… How did you do it?”

“There will be plenty of time for that later. Drive.”

Will does. Hannibal directs him to a cliffside home two hours in the opposite direction. Will stands at the cliff’s edge and watches the face of it battered by the sea, waves that devour with mindless hunger.

Hannibal grabs Will’s shoulder and spins him around. Their eyes meet in the morning light. A key glistens in Hannibal’s hand. “Come inside.”

The house is all sharp angles and glass. The door’s just barely closed behind them when Will pushes Hannibal back against a window and, at last, steals the breath from his lungs. The kiss is all unbridled hunger, years of ache eroding as a cliff to the sea, spilling like blood from a vein. Hannibal’s hands work the buttons open on Will’s shirt, and he dips down to suck kisses from throat to collarbone.

There’s a dust cover still on the table when Hannibal pushes Will down onto it. Through the barrier of glass the sea is muffled, but the swell of waves mingle still with the blood rushing in Will’s ears. Hannibal is ravenous, marking Will with lips and teeth across his chest, raising his nipples to hard nubs and pulling sounds, broken and starved, from Will’s lips.

“Say it,” Hannibal pleads, panting near Will’s hip, fingers fumbling with his belt. “Say that you love me.”

“I love you,” Will says, and the words come out broken sobs, grasping desperately at Hannibal’s shoulders. “I love you.”

Hannibal wastes no time then tugging Will’s pants and underwear off and tossing them to the floor. He swallows Will’s cock with the same desperation that’s been simmering between them since they walked through the door. Will fucks up into his mouth and down his throat. Hannibal moans and grips Will’s hips hard enough to bruise.

Tears tumble from Will's eyes as he comes, shocking and bright. The cliff continues its slow crawl into the sea. Will’s blood boils with the force of his release. Hannibal kisses the taste of it into Will’s mouth. Blindly, Will reaches down for Hannibal’s fly.

“You could have escaped any time you wanted,” Will pants into Hannibal’s neck. “Couldn’t you?”

“Captive only by your heart,” Hannibal assures him. 

They kiss again as Will pulls Hannibal’s cock out. He strokes him slow and sweet, coaxing confessions from his lips.

“I would have waited a thousand years,” Hannibal breathes. “More. There can be no life for me now without you.”

Slick sounds fill the room as Will works Hannibal’s leaking cock to completion. He all but howls when he comes, Will’s deft grip milking every sticky drop as it coats his fingers. When he’s through, the two of them clinging to one another, Will brings the release to his lips to taste.

He closes his eyes and swipes the tip of his tongue across one finger, then the next. Soon, he’s sucking each digit hungrily between his lips, moaning low. Hannibal watches him with eyes wide and shining.

“How do I taste?” Hannibal asks when the last drop has been savored.

“Why don’t you tell me?”

Their kiss now is languid, unhurried by time or circumstance. The sea seems to whisper through the glass, inviting. Will wonders absently, Hannibal’s tongue on his, what that great and powerful ocean could conceal. If her mighty force would be any match for that which now flows between them.

Finally, they part and redress. Hannibal pulls covers from tables and chairs and sideboards. The house feels frozen in time. Will stands at the window and watches the sun dance behind thin wisps of clouds.

“Where will we go?” he asks after Hannibal has changed his clothes and brought out a stack of things for Will to change into.

“Wherever you would like. For today at least, I think we should be safe here. But we should be on our way soon.”

Hannibal helps him change, though it borders on ridiculous. Will sits on the edge of the dining table and allows Hannibal to button his shirt, crisp and white and tailored to fit him.

“You were going to bring us here. Me and Abigail.”

“I still have your passports tucked into my suitcase. Clothes and essentials for us all.”

Will reaches out pulls Hannibal in, tucks his face into the safety of his chest. “Leave her things here when we go.”

“Of course.”

“You know I meant it when I said that I forgive you. I think I’ll keep on meaning it for the rest of my life, no matter what you do.”

“The feeling is mutual.”

Will holds fast to Hannibal, eyes squeezed against the morning, the swell of Hannibal’s heart pumping strong in one ear, the ocean’s call in the other. He’s taken the dive already, he knows, a great and fearsome plunge into unknowable depths. Giving in, Will thinks, is the easiest part.

Seabirds gather and cry their calls. Hannibal’s heart beats on.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> come say hi on [tumblr](http://crossroadscastiel.tumblr.com)!


End file.
